Diane Wolfthal; Images of Rape: The "Heroic" Tradition and Its Alternatives. . - book review - Brief Article

DIANE WOLFTHAL

Images of Rape: The "Heroic" Tradition and Its Alternatives.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 286 pp., 118 b/w ills. $74.95

Images of erotic domination and outright sexual violence hold an indisputably important and troubling place in Western culture, and yet it took until nearly the end of the violent 20th century before art history produced an integrative survey of the genres and traditions in which rape--the name by which we know sexual violence--was visualized. Diane Wolfthal's pioneering book, Images of Rape: The "Heroic" Tradition and Its Alternatives, succeeds admirably in making this history intelligible. Replete with probing visual analyses of individual works and careful contextualizations of genres, it is a work of scholarship both industrious--sometimes to a fault--and wide-ranging. Guided by an abiding feminist consciousness, Wolfthal is especially keen on striking up interdisciplinary conversations, but also judicious in invoking contemporary theory. In all of the six substantial chapters, each comprising a "genre" study that interlocks in interesting ways with its neighbors, the author applies just enough critical p ressure to crack open the contradictions of a cultural and legal discourse where aggressive masculinity is naturalized--indeed, valorized--and woman's resistance suppressed. While at times one may find key arguments stumbling over the wealth of evidence assembled to support them, the book gives a welcome conceptual coherence to this dizzying array of material, thereby setting the terms by which a difficult iconographic metacategory in Western art will be discussed for years to come.

It is commonly understood among social scientists that Western legal culture enables the ideological construction of rape principally through the control of discourse, or "talk," in the courtroom, a privileging of the defendant's--or the defense lawyer's--power to reconstruct and thereby represent events. Most of these straggles over representation hinge on the issue of consent, as Wolfthal points out (p. 152). Consent remains a slippery legal concept in any society that accepts as normative some degree of coercion in sexual relations. But it is not only ethical norms and existing relations of domination (sexual and political) that produce standards for what constitutes voluntary agreement; epistemological paradigms--the historically shifting conceptions of human consciousness, agency, and intentionality--also play a part. What becomes of the standard for consent, for example, when the victim's ability to give consent has been enfeebled or conjured away by unseen forces (p. 152)? Such questions were also com monplace in the juridical culture of the later Middle Ages. How could consent be measured, for example, when the resourceful medieval lover employed magical techniques to arouse desire in his intransigent beloved? Could not he--like his counterpart today, who bewitches his prey with "date-rape" drugs--assure himself that consent was not coerced? Pygmalion, the intrepid realist sculptor of legend, appealed to the goddess of love to help him procure the lady's favors because the lady, mute as a block of stone, could not consent even if she had wanted to--he, too, bucks the system. And when, as in the 16th century, the biblical Joseph became an exemplar of male oppression at the hands of a sexually aggressive woman (Potiphar's wife), everything gets confused. As these examples from Wolfthal's final chapter reveal, the reliability of any standard for consent--which never has and never really could be seen in gender-neutral terms--falls victim not only to ideological manipulation, as still so often happens, but al so to the rampant innovativeness of culture as well. When this comes about, the field is clear for patriarchy to reassert its right to interpret rape.

Images of Rape works against the grain of this persistent confusion. To do so, Wolfthal builds a large part of her project on this fundamental premise: although the canonical rape images enshrined by art history frequently "served as a sign for something else... they were also, on some level, about 'real' rape, to use Susan Estrich's term" (p. 26). (1) Consequently, much of the exploration in these pages concerns rape imagery's doubling of signification. Following the lead of theorists like Mieke Bal, Wolfthal insists that "the word rape is really a metaphor for a narrative event, in which each participant, as well as the narrator, may well interpret the act differently" (p. 3). This does not mean she downplays rape's actuality, or what one sociologist calls its "social facticity"; (2) in fact, Wolfthal continually returns to the primacy of rape's event status, assuming a more or less stable (and modern) definition of rape "as a crime in which one person forces another to engage in sexual intercourse" (p. 2) . Although she never states it explicitly, rape imagery in Wolfthal's view always entails a double violence: the violence of the event itself (or the series of moments that make up the event) and the violence done to meaning in the transfiguration of the event into narrative. Seen in this way, as a constellation of legal, social, and cultural discourses powerful enough to turn reality on its head, rape may be the consummate work of patriarchal ideology (Wolfthal eschews the word ideology, but it is precisely what she is exploring when she sees rape imagery pointing to that "something else").

Where, precisely, one locates historical rape imagery along the fault lines separating event and narrative, reality and representation depends not only on the norms that governed attitudes and laws at particular times but also, and perhaps more importantly, on the social specificities of genre and audience. Though it seems safe to say that patriarchy has never wholly succeeded in normalizing rape--how could it do so and protect the class privileges it encodes?--within certain genres of rape iconography, and within certain contexts of patronage and consumption, glaringly patriarchal attitudes have enjoyed extended periods of hegemonic free play. Chapter 1 focuses on the most prominent of these genres, the strain of rape iconography best known to students of art history, called by Wolfthal, borrowing a term from Susan Brownmiller, "heroic" rape imagery. (3) With considerable powers of synthesis, Wolfthal takes on the literature that has accrued around canonical images like Giambologna's Rape of the Sabine Wome n, Nicolas Poussin's painted version of the same theme, Correggio's Jupiter and Jo, and Titian's Rape of Europa. A complementary section discusses the deployment of mythological rape scenes on Italian wedding chests (cassoni) and spalliera paintings (domestic wall decorations), where the action often assumes the character of an aristocratic hunt (pp. 12-13).

To insiders it may seem that the duration of this chapter is devoted to maneuvering through the thicket of earlier scholarship; the arguments here are compelling, but at the same time unsurprising. From an analysis of Poussin's Sabine Women, for example, we learn that the work "serves to distance the viewer from the horror of the event" (p. 7). Wolfthal's ideas about distancing effects built into the visual structure of certain kinds of rape imagery reappear later in the book (see p. 36), but immediately they beg the question: If an artist like Correggio "avoids any explicit depiction of sexual intercourse" and instead "idealizes" the rape (p. 20); if he and others found cause to reject Ovid's version of the myth, with its franker treatment of sexual violence, and chose instead to "depict... the rape as if it were a seduction" (p. 18), what does this really tell us about the artists or patrons? Who among their contemporaries did not attempt to soften or mediate mythological rape narratives so as to avoid dir ect depictions of forced coitus? Unsparing depictions of sexual intercourse certainly existed in the 16th century, notably in the form of prints, circulated within princely and bourgeois collections as erotica. (4) Aren't these, too, part of the "heroic" tradition? Wolfthal abstains from a comparison and does not venture to say if and where the lines of genre had been drawn among artists and patrons, or if they existed at all (one wonders if the frontier then, as today, lay in the frank disclosure of penetration, since none of the well-known "heroic" rape images of the Renaissance go so far).

Wolfthal approaches the question another way, outlining two primary means by which "heroic" rape images were calculated to arouse male viewers: one in which the violence and terror of the act are softened, so as to obscure the suffering of the victim, "constructing" her as a willing lover (p. 20), and another in which the ferocity of the assailant, and the pain and fear of the victim, confront the beholder as an object of fascination. Titian's Rape of Europa holds center stage in this discussion, perhaps because it exemplifies the Renaissance painter's hijacking of female pain to pay off male pleasure. In these scenes--which, technically, can be called "abductions"--the source of erotic fascination is not forced copulation itself but the frightened confusion of the woman. Ovid's statement about Leucothoe's fear in the face of Apollo's lust--"Her very fear becomes her"- could serve as a leitmotiv for artists like Titian, who took its erotic principle as their cue to highlight the disarray of the woman's hair and clothing, and turn the female character's embarrassment and humiliation into an aphrodisiac for the spectator (p. 21).

These observations are parlayed into a provocative analysis of the "political context" of eroticized "heroic" rape imagery, and Wolfthal identifies several interlocking contexts. At the level of political self-fashioning, we are shown how princes like Philip II, to whom Titian addressed his greatest rape scenes, would have likely used such scenes as screens for imaginative projection, checking their own fantasies of omnipotence against the virility and power of Roman gods who rape. Following Margaret Carroll, Wolfthal posits here a homology between the sexual subordination of women and the political domination of subjects (p. 23) . (5) On another level, private constructions of princely identity through rape imagery could be made to mesh with public assertions of political authority: when Grand Duke Francesco de' Medici ordered the installation of Giambologna's Rape of the Sabine Women in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, his political authority got its boost not only from the invocation of Rome's legendary origins but also from the invitation it extended to all male beholders to join the duke in celebrating the glory of unfettered masculinity (p. 24). Here and elsewhere Wolfthal reminds us that, while the High Renaissance signaled a new era of sexual freedom for men, who exercised greater powers of discretion with regard to marriage and its moral strictures than ever before, women tasted few of the fruits of Renaissance individualism. With such observations, here as elsewhere in the book, Wolfthal casts her own project into the mold of Joan Kelly's famous question, "Did women have a Renaissance?" (6)

Wolfthal makes room in this first chapter for a critique of past art historical treatments of "heroic" rape imagery, focusing on text-book canonists like H. W. Janson and Frederick Hartt. Although the author would like it noted that the "history of writing about 'heroic' rape imagery is extremely complex" (p. 28), the exercise is like shooting fish in a barrel. That these historians seized on such opportunities to talk about sex in the coded language of aesthetic appreciation; that they relished the chance to liken sexual predation to an aristocratic hunt; that they called female figures "girls" despite their being painted as women, and so on--none of this is terribly surprising. But neither is it entirely gratuitous. For with these critiques we are set on the trajectory of Wolfthal's principal arguments, which blow like forceful gales through the protective covers of predetermined canonicity and aesthetic grandeur, under which rape has long been inscribed in the private and public cultures of art.

Chapter 2 consists of a series of iconographic studies of individual scenes and roundel cycles from a group of mostly 13th-century illuminated Bibles (known as Picture Bibles). Much of this material appeared in these pages in 1993, and so may be familiar to readers. (7) Analysis hinges mostly on the numerous cues and conventions illuminators used to identify certain figures as the victims of rape: signs of force, like the seizure of the woman's wrist, disheveled hair and torn clothes, which mark the victim of an attack. In a few more explicit scenes, male assailants are shown grabbing at the victim's breast or even mounting her; in one scene from the Morgan Picture Bible (ca. 1240-50), the corpse of the Levite's wife is found stretched out on the ground. Less compromising in their depiction of the horrific consequences of the deed, these images signal for Wolfthal the stirrings of an "alternative" tradition in European rape iconography, one that "makes it clear that there is no happy ending for victims of se xual violence" (p. 46). Examining these images, we are suddenly in touch with a very different attitude than that which stood behind the erotic bombast and sublimated politics of Renaissance rape imagery. In the moral universe of the Hebrew Bible and its medieval Christian exegesis, rapists are in fact punished (p. 48).

Few readers will miss the fact that, while in Wolfthal's scheme the ideologically fatuous tradition of Renaissance and Baroque rape imagery gets a name-heroic--the alternative tradition, which in fact preexists it, does not. Perhaps because it carries its own ambivalences, or because of its historic failure to overturn hegemonic conceptions, it simply is "alternative" (also, one supposes that neither preheroic, nor postheroic, nor antiheroic would have been quite right). Whereas later chapters show this alternative tradition extending through the 16th and 17th centuries into our own time, Wolfthal's points of emphasis locate its true historical berth in the Middle Ages. In the main the author configures it simply as a foil to "heroic" rape imagery by virtue of its being "critical of the assailant and sympathetic to his victim" and its tendency to "exhibit a tragic force that makes clear that rape is a savage act" (p. 37).

Vaguely unsatisfying as these thumbnail definitions tend to be, Wolfthal's descriptive foray into the medieval illuminator's repertoire of gesture and expression brims with interesting facts and insights; it also raises one of the more trenchant questions of the book: What is at stake when beholders of moralized rape scenes are cued to properly identify the victim of sexual assault? Why must rape victims look the part? "Heroic" rape erotica supplied its own answer, but in the "alternative" tradition the reason shifts. Simple narrative legibility is, of course, a factor in this interest, but more important is what might be called forensic legibility. "Rape is notoriously difficult to prove; to convict a rapist, courts demand evidence other than a woman's word" (p. 42). This appears to have been true in the Middle Ages and early modern era as well. Records for successful rape prosecutions from this time are few and far between (p. 151). As Wolfthal makes clear, in the highly visual legal culture of the Middle Ages, the proper visual coding of woman qua victim (past, present, or future) therefore had something crucial in common with the validation of a rape victim's legal claims against her assailant. What a woman had to say in court in order to validate her claim was routinely subordinated to other kinds of evidence, one example being whether or not the woman raised "the hue and cry"-in effect, whether she publicly trumpeted the absence of her consent at the very moment of the crime's commission (p. 43). In the domain of pictures the "legal" standard is different still. Medieval painters rarely depicted the "hue and cry" but, rather, cemented the fact of rape through the visual identification of the victim.

Wolfthal insists that the Middle Ages had a "collective image of how a rape victim should look" (p. 43); within the "alternative" tradition, the cultural, if not the legal, standard for this "look" stood in stark contrast to the alluring disarray of the victim of "heroic" rape--it was deliberately unerolic, intended to arouse pity rather than desire. Educated 13th-century readers would have instantly recognized in the victimization of Old Testament figures like Dinah a prototype of the Christian martyr's virtuous suffering (p. 20). Within the moral universe of the Picture Bibles, heroic women defend their bodies and suffer the brutality of rape not for the sake of their own individual rights but to uphold the Christian virtues of virginity and chastity.

Wolfthal's determination to cross-reference a wide range of discourses and documents, both textual and visual, and to draw out certain kinds of analogies places her investigation well above the conventions of traditional iconographic research; her purpose is to construct a kind of historical iconology of rape imagery. There are hints here of Erwin Panofsky's mandate to juxtapose cultural artifacts with apparent affinities, and in so doing to grasp the inherent logic of a culture's construction of meaning. Art, law, theology, and social history are made to converge in Wolfthal's readings, but too often her analysis stops at the level where their mutual reinforcement or, better, their ideo. logical compatability has been demonstrated.

"Why does rape occur in war?" (pp. 96, 98) is the pivotal question for Wolfthal as she sets out to extend the boundaries of the "alternative" tradition into the context of war's depredations and the conduct of soldiers. Beginning with an analysis of a 5th-century B.C.E. Greek painter's rendition of Cassandra's impending violation during the Sack of Troy, the chapter leaps forward to a group of 14th-century manuscripts, the mythological rape imagery of the German Renaissance, broad-sheets alleging sexual horrors committed by Turkish troops, and contemporary images of German and Swiss mercenaries, and concludes by examining two print series depicting the horrors of war, one by Jacques Callot, the other by the later Dutch painter-printmaker Romeyn de Hooghe.

This (chapter 3) is perhaps the most ambitious and valuable chapter in the book; it contains more original research and direct engagement with primary textual sources--as well as less dependence on earlier writers--and it addresses a broader range of concerns and interpretative issues than hitherto. But it also reveals the limitations of the author's conceptual categories on a number of points. Again we are in the presence of "a category of art that is generally sympathetic to the victim and critical of her assailant" (p. 60). How reliable is this binary scheme? Does the condemnation of rape consistently entail sympathy for the victim or explicit criticism of her assailant? Does the valorization of the assailant always mean a dehumanizing role for the victim? How do the contlitions of war affect attitudes toward rape-do social attitudes shift toward greater ambivalence, or a harsher polarization, or a more solid consensus? Despite Wolfthal's own point that "Medieval society was ambivalent about rape during w artime" (p. 64), she persists in looking for more or less straight answers from the images. This is surprising, given the rich context she develops around the question, Why does rape occur in war?

One medieval perspective on the general problem of rape, developed outside legal circles, maintained that it was woman's visible physical beauty that inspired lust and provoked men to commit acts of violence. According to a widely read essay by Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, this theory of rape's origins in female beauty compelled early medieval nuns living in regions threatened by Danish invaders to mutilate their own faces in an attempt to ward off the "passionate" advances of intruders (pp. 62-63) (8) The flip side of this, as Kathryn Gravdal has pointed out, is "the assumption that whatever is attractive begs to be ravished: carried off, seized, or raped" (an assumption revealed in the evolution of the French verb ravir, and its derivative ravissement, which conflates the action of carrying a woman off by force and the exaltation that drives a man to the ensuing sexual act). An alternative theory developed by medieval writers affirmed the customary equation of women's bodies with male property, and thus saw rape during wartime as any other legitimate eizure of booty during conquest (p. 65; the source of our modern term rape is the Roman legal concept raptus, which can mean any form of theft, abduction, or seizure of property but refers especially to "noncontractual marriage by abduction") (9) While some codes of martial conflict sought to protect noncombatants under the banner of jus in bello and therefore condemned rape in wartime, others accepted it as a licensed behavior attending conquests, part of the plunder condoned by law (p. 65).

Dispensing with such arguments about the causes of rape in war, Wolfthal ventures a different explanation: rape occurs in war because the ideology and conditions of war privileged the unfettered expression of masculinity's most virulent forms. "Aggression and virility were highly prized in soldiers, sometimes with tragic results for women" (p. 97). Much of the chapter plays out this notion, and by and large the imagery supports this interpretation (though not as well as the textual evidence the author expertly marshals as context). When Wolfthal juxtaposes her conclusions about the "rape in war" problem with her earlier observations about "heroic" rape imagery, the valorizing pretenses of the mythological genres are deflated further. For Wolfthal, criticism of the destructive potential of runaway masculinity, and the manifold dangers it posed to societies badly dislocated by armed conflicts, was the leitmotiv of this variety of "alternative" rape imagery.

As a critique of the emergent codes and "social dramas" of masculinity during wartime, the chapter succeeds admirably, though this success comes at a price. The author sees her study contributing, in a phrase borrowed from R. Hanning and P. Dinter, to an unmasking of "the problematic nature of the warrior-hero ideal of Western culture" (p. 98). (10) The construction and coding of masculinity is, of course, a lightning-rod topic in cultural studies these days, and I have no wish to expose the limits of my familiarity with its discourses by attempting a critique. However, and notwithstanding a brilliant book like Klaus Theweleit's Mannerphantasien (1977), it seems to me there are some pitfalls in the tendency to revisit the history of warfare from the angle of the history of sexuality. Images of Rape devotes a long section to the visual constructions of a dangerous kind of swashbuckling masculinity through the genre portraits of German mercenary (Landsknechi) standard bearers (pp. 83-9 1) but tells us little a bout how the use of mercenaries transformed medieval warfare and, with it, the chivalric codes of war and the warrior ideal (cf. p. 91). Taking the long view, Wolfthal's analysis tends to leave aside the historical specificities of warfare--its material conditions, its political and economic impulses, its ongoing cultural interpretation. The diversity of attitudes toward soldiers is likewise collapsed beneath assertions of a kind of transhistorical, alternative viewpoint, one that "generally.. condemn[s) rapists as brutes who commit a range of barbaric acts, including terrorizing innocent women" (p. 98).

Indeed, on this very question--rape as the infliction of terror--Wolfthal has missed a crucial opportunity to apprehend the most nefarious manifestation of rape in war, that is, the systematic, organized rape of civilian populations by soldiers, undertaken as an instrument of terror. To some extent it may be that pathological masculinity among Serbian army troops and irregulars (Chetniks) during the genocidal war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, for example, (11) played a part in the men's willingness to rape and operate the rape/death camps, yet to rely on this as an explanation would be to evade the more serious problems of the strategy's political conception and bureaucratic implementation. Such an awareness is, of course, far afield from the historical focus of Images of Rape, but it lies close to its author's adamant concern with the persistence of rape today. Any feminist history of warfare should rightly ask whether the sexual atrocities found in premodern warfare were really only shameful side effe cts of the warrior's brutality and impetuous sexuality or if they were part of something more integral to the changing character of armed conflict.

Despite this blind spot, Wolfthal demonstrates conclusively that 16th-century German society concerned itself deeply with the "problem" of the soldier's virility. Most publicists, of course, were taking aim at mercenaries in particular, who might even be equated with the Turks in some broadsheets. In the devastating satires of the paid killer's lascivious behavior by artists like Urs Graf (himself a Swiss Reislaufer), Martin Weygel, and Sebald Beham (whose etching of a standard bearer hunched over and masturbating the tail of a serpent coiled up between his thighs competes with the best of Baldung's mocking grotesques), sexual misconduct by itinerant soldiers emerged as a key ingredient of the disorder so lamented by chroniclers like Sebastian Franck. At the same time, it should be recalled, mercenaries were invoked and praised as chivalrous in pro-imperial songs by prominent publicists like Hans Sachs of Nuremberg. (12)

The author finds special significance in the fact that Jacques Callot's Large Miseries and Misfortunes of War etchings of 1633 included a number of uncompromising depictions of sexual assault. Callot is contrasted with a younger contemporary, the printmaker Romeyn de Hooghe, whose double-page engravings reported on the atrocities allegedly committed during the French army's invasion of the Dutch Republic in 1672. Whereas de Hooghe constructed his own "miseries of war" images from a nationalist perspective, "enflaming narrow political passions against an enemy who had savagely attacked [his] homeland" (p. 92), Callot planned his work independently, without the benefit of a patron, and avoided any direct references to specific events, uniforms, flags, or perpetrators. Instead, he responded directly to the atrocities of war, rape included, without advancing a "narrowly nationalistic viewpoint" (p. 94). Why does rape occur in war? The answer Wolfthal attributes to Callot's series, "that men are at fault and that rape may be eradicated, not by women smearing mud on their faces or slicing off their noses, but rather by punishing the conduct of men" (p. 97), clearly reflects her own understanding. Through this historical detour we learn that exponents of the "alternative" tradition in rape imagery not only made common cause with the victims, criticized the assailants, and analyzed the causes of rape, but also recommended responses, even the kind "justice" itself resolutely would not provide.

In chapter 4 Wolfthal treats rape images produced for medieval legal treatises and civic courtrooms and reads their distinctive iconography through an expanded, public context for judicial imagery. Complex and convincing, the arguments here are well buttressed by a formidable German line of research on premodern legal culture, judicial practices, and the iconography of town hall and courtroom. (13) Fully in command of her materials, the author also permits herself a greater range of moral expression (the tone in earlier chapters is largely restrained, if not muted). Because she perceives within the visual culture of the late medieval courthouse a historic new program to stifle woman's "voice" in public discourse, and sets out to show how that program was at times subverted, she refuses to believe, as Ellen Rooney has asserted, that women's "resistance... goes unread" in the medieval and early modem regimes of discourse (p. 126). (14) A select family of images, Wolfthal counters, preserves the violence of "re al rape" against the onset of oblivion.

Following from her effort in the earlier chapters to discern positive or negative attitudes toward rape in the construction of biblical narratives and antiwar polemics, Wolfthal proposes that the legal and judicial contexts in which rape iconography appears imparted to the images "a greater ambivalence" than that developed in these other contexts. Moving away from the binary categories used elsewhere in the book, she offers here a compelling historical argument, which runs roughly as follows: the legal tradition of the feudal era--based largely on customary law and embodied, for example, in great territorial compendiums like Eike von Repgow's Sachsenspiegel of about 1225--explicitly condemned rape as a crime punishable by death. By contrast, the emergent legal culture of the Renaissance, increasingly beholden to Roman law, which had no legal category for "rape" in the modern sense, and was generally "hostile to an older... legal solution, which accepted marriage between rapist and victim as a reparation of t he crime," (15) began to "blur the distinction between rape and seduction" (p. 100). Premonitory of this shift are a group of 14th-century manuscripts of Gratian's treatise on canon law, the Decretum (composed about 1130-40), in which a group of hypothetical legal cases (causae) involving rape are illustrated with scenes where the coercive elements in the sexual encounter are abstracted away, despite the clear language of the text. For Wolfthal the shift completes itself in the transformations within a select group of judicial allegories commissioned for town halls or courtrooms, the to-poi of which included rape or adultery accusations and their aftermaths--Rogier van der Weyden's Justice of Trajan and Herkinbald (its appearance preserved in a tapestry in Bern), Dirc Bouts,s Justice of Emperor Otto III (painted for the town hall of Louvain), and two early 16th-century renditions of the Herkinbald legend.

Wolfthal sets this transformation of attitudes within the images against a profound legal-historical shift, whereby rape underwent redefinition from being a violent crime to a sexual offense, routinely lumped together with fornication, adultery, and seduction. Courts resisted the indictment of male sexuality, obsessed about the rise in "female" adultery, and placed an increasingly heavy burden of proof on female plaintiffs in rape cases (pp. 124-25). Drawing on the work of Susan Smith, Lyndal Roper, and Renee Pigaud, the author sketches the gradual erosion of women's collective credibility as witnesses--not only in court, but in life--early in the 16th century. This process was hastened by the repeated invocation of derogatory moralizing tales like Potiphar's Wife, the Judgment of Solomon, Aristotle and Phyllis--that family of misogynist themes known as the Power of Women, which also appeared often in town halls in the Netherlands (p. 123). In the cultural ambience, no less the visual culture, created by thi s legislated urban morality, with its tightening restrictions on social and sexual deviance and its increasingly restrictive roles for women, public justice paintings, she argues, "served to reinforce the belief that women's word cannot be trusted, and that it was the sexual behaviour of women, not of men, that was the real menace to society" (p. 119).

While the shift in attitudes Wolfthal traces by comparing Rogier's and the two German versions of the Herkinbald story is convincing, the central claim made for Bouts,s Justice of Otto III is less so. "The empress's lust threatened not simply her marriage, but also the legal processes of the state. Otto must control his wife's lust in order to rule effectively" (pp. 117-18). Why this function of Bouts's painting, its "reinforcing [of] ... a series of contemporary gender stereotypes" (p. 117), should hold sway over its other meanings as a judicial exemplum is unclear. Wolfthal recognizes how such images commented on the political relationship between the town and its noble lord, how they reminded judges and council members of the gravity of capital sentences (p. 116), and how they dramatized the immanence of God's justice in the revelation of truth in the courtroom, thus mediating earthly and divine justice. Screened off from these other political and ideological functions, the thesis that spotlights the wors ening legal status of women loses some of its own political resonance and becomes simply another moment in the ongoing defeat of the "alternative" tradition, in which the pains of rape, and women's account of it, were seen as real.

Even though the "alternative" tradition(s) of rape imagery may have to do without a name, for Wolfthal the admirable moments of its story need not remain without a face. Whereas earlier chapters locate the cultural and political impulses to condemn rape in the impersonal force of custom in the Sachsenspiegel, in embattled Christian virtues, or in the biblical paradigm of just judgment, in chapter 5 we meet a true flesh-and-blood opponent of rape: the late medieval courtier, scribe, and protofeminist author Christine de Pizan. Like Jacques Callot two centuries later, Christine appears to us as a critic of abuse so conscious and determined that she would not content herself with mere condemnations of rape as sin or crime; as a skillful and imaginative redactor of classical texts, in full control of the reins of literary interpretation and expression, she went further, proposing throughout her writings strategies for combating rape as ideology. Wolfthal characterizes this process--borrowing key ideas and a cert ain militant rhetoric from Sharon Marcus (16)--as Christine's "disruption of the traditional rape script, which she accomplishes by refusing to imagine women as rapable and then by visualizing them as forceful avengers" (p. 127).

How Christine, a widow and an Italian at the French court, assumed this historic mantle is a story only half told here, but the circumstances of her experience with rape and its representations are sufficiently outlined. In late medieval France and Burgundy sexual assault was a fact of life and a seemingly intractable problem for local officials (p. 128). Elites did concern themselves with rape, but mostly for reasons of self-interest, that is, the protection of (male) property, law and order, and the defense of Christian values. Active models of what we would call "principled" resistance to the dominant conceptions, patterns of behavior, and mechanisms of privilege surrounding rape law seem to have been few and far between. Wolfthal cites the rather unusual case of the Parisian widow Ysablet des Champions, who was raped by servants of the duke of Burgundy during their visit to the city in 1393. Having raised an elaborate "hue and cry" during the assault, Ysablet went on to build a successful court case again st her assailants (pp. 128-29). Whether or not Christine knew the case is, naturally, beside the point; her field of deployment was not the courtrooms of Paris but the literary culture of the Valois court, with its love of classical myths and its taste for bizarrerie. Likewise, her sources of inspiration for the miniatures in her books were other luxury manuscripts in the royal libraries, like those Picture Bibles and Ovids analyzed in chapter 2, with their mixed messages of consent and resistance, seduction and brutalization.

In the images made under Christine's supervision for three luxury copies of her most popular work, an anthology known as the Epistre Othea (ca. 1399-1400), the writer, Wolfthal argues, "chose to avoid the explicit depiction of sexual violence" (p. 130); this was done in contrast to earlier French manuscripts, like an Ovide moralise in Paris (ca. 1325-50) that shows, for example, Helen seized roughly by a chain-mail-clad Paris (likewise, Christine chooses the word ravir, with its connotations of abduction, to describe Paris's actions). Later, in Christine's cherished feminist paean, Livre de la Cite des Dames (a work from about 1406, which, though not illustrated with mythological subjects, "influenced later imagery" [p. 1401]), the medieval author "challenges the myth that rape is heroic" by employing a "consistent tone of moral outrage" (p. 141) and shifts from ravir to the unequivocal efforcer. Christine dispensed with the chronological organization of these legends as found in Boccaccio (Sabines, Lucretia, the Galatian Queen) and instead grouped them together under the polemical rubric "Refuting those men who claim women want to be raped." Christine also rewrote the stories themselves, challenging the interpretations of contemporary male authors, who held up Lucretia's suicide, for example, as a virtuous defense of honor and maidenhood (p. 145). Rejecting the view that rape victims were worth more to family honor dead than alive, Christine deallegorized the story of Lucretia to better expose the injustice, using it, simply, "to show the horror of rape" (p. 145). Her version of the story, Wolfthal points out, concludes with a proposal for a law requiring the execution of convicted rapists, one that would be "fitting, just and holy [couvenable, juste et sainte]" (p. 145).

Wolfthal makes no apologies for her admiration of Christine's frank advocacy of an ethos of retribution in dealing with rape's legendary perpetrators. Both modern and medieval feminist writers find their champion in the story of the Galatian Queen. When the latter appears in Boccaccio's Des cleres et nobles femmes, for example, as a petitioner before her husband, she proffers to him the decapitated head of her assailant to aid in the restoration of justice; in the illustration, the headsman appears in the background (fig. 86). In the text of Cite des Dames, however, it is the Galatian Queen herself who slays the man, and this interpretation eventually finds its way back into Boccaccio illustrations later in the century (cf. fig. 87). Wolfthal finds here nothing less than a refutation of the construction of women as inherently rapable, a subversion of rape's inevitability. Quoting with approval Marcus's imperative that feminists "begin to imagine the female body as subject to change, as a potential object of f ear and agent of violence" (p. 146), the author then places this template of militant responsiveness over her medieval heroine: "This is exactly what Christine does. She subverts the narrative tradition by constructing a new scenario in which a woman kills her rapist" (p. 146).

All this can safely be said about Cite des Dames, though one can only arrive at such a conclusion for Christine's total oeuvre by downplaying the less than equivocal treatments of sexual domination found in earlier works like the Othea, and I think Wolfthal does this. A rare moment in a study otherwise careful about acknowledging ambiguities in the evidence, the passage finds the author asserting the transhistorical relevance of Marcus's call for a politicized league of anti-rape preventionists and avengers. Perhaps Wolfthal, firm in her commitments, should care very little if her advocacy of retributive violence against rapists calls down on the present book a single antifeminist cliche. Radicals fight fire with fire, and Marcus's politicized rhetoric--let alone Wolfthal's--is hardly the most incendiary one may enounter in contemporary culture. (17) But it is striking how the frank discussion of a woman's moral right to vengeance on rapists coincides here with a sharp rise in the moral tenor of Wolfthal's wr iting, as if the author wished to match the "consistent tone of moral outrage" (p. 141) she discerns in Christine. That it happens at this particular juncture in the book calls attention to the fault lines separating cultural politics and historical interpretation. I fear that just cause in the former forced the author's hand in the latter, and as a result the politics of rape in Christine de Pizan become reified before nuances can be further explored.

In the broader circles of art historical discussion today the discursive covers of predetermined canonicity and aesthetic grandeur no longer have the cachet they once did, hence their ideological usefulness has partly dissipated. Having absorbed the lessons of psychoanalysis from Freud to Bataille, our discipline grapples with the terrors of eros and the eroticism of violence energetically and, it is hoped, critically. Of course, art historians working in the cultural trust will forever (re)invent comfortable ways for museum goers to appreciate "difficult" art, even images featuring sexual violence. But some pictures will remain unrecuperable and persist in challenging us. In the conclusion to Images of Rape, Wolfthal allows us to bristle in the chilly presence of one work that entreats the beholder to become complicit in the hideous sport of an impending gang rape. Christian van Couwenbergh's Rape Scene of 1632 shows a naked Dutchman, seated at the foot of a bed, restraining a naked African woman on his lap while she straggles to free herself. A seminaked figure standing at the left points to the figures on the bed and, with a ribald and lascivious expression, "fixes the viewer with his gaze" (p. 190). Despite the initial attempts by cataloguers at the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Strasbourg to "explain" the image and fit it with a palatable title, Wolfthal makes it clear there can be no getting around its atrocity (p. 191). In fact, Couwenbergh, whose oeuvre included many coarse erotic works, has placed his gleaming white interlocutor so prominently in the visual field as to ensure his audience will not escape complicity in the assault.

It would be remiss not to mention that Wolfthal's reading extends beyond this insight and includes a well-informed discussion of Couwenbergh's not-so-coded eroticization of racial domination, which is related convincingly to the Dutch empire's reliance on black slavery at this time (pp. 192-94). This aspect of the painting is surely an instance of that "something else" rape imagery is so often about, yet the work feels like it is more about "real rape" than anything else. With that realization, we find ourselves confronted not merely with a contrived theatrical scene featuring actors who appear ready to relish the pleasures of rape. We are also made aware that there was an audience that relished such entertainments, and this awareness cannot be comfortably historicized. The work opens into the present.

In putting the matter this way I am pushing Wolfthal's analysis just a little further, in a direction it does not really want to go. Despite the great strides Images of Rape makes in delineating the functional contexts of the iconographies it surveys, the dynamics of their reception remain relatively unexplored. One symptom of this is Wolfthal's tendency to allow a certain kind of normative moral response mechanism--reifications by any other name--to stand in for the kind of "thicker" description of consumption patterns, localized responses, and psychosexual behaviors that would be offered in a study tilted more rigorously toward reception. Where models for response do appear, they tend to be drawn rather crudely along gender lines. In the case of Couwenbergh's painting (which Wolfthal struggles to invest with the multiplicity of interpretative possibilities characteristic of Dutch art from this time) the author adds race into the equation, but the resulting balance sheet of responses is artificial:

...the viewer could enjoy the nudity of the woman, could see in her defeat the powerlessness of the African people, could adopt the comedic stance of the male participants, could focus on the woman's resistance and condemn the men's brutal actions, or could adopt all these responses. While most white male viewers may well have identified with the assailants in this painting, and most black women with the victim, white women and black men may well have been torn between an identification based on race and one based on gender. (p. 196)

Apparently finding the whole question of "rape voyeurism" too unsavory, the author escapes from a whole range of problems surrounding the eroticism of the image. Such a list of possible receptions as she offers also flies in the face of the likelihood that the painting's circulation did not include black men, black women, or even white women, Wolfthal's own discussion (earlier in the book) about measures taken in the 16th and 17th century to keep erotic images from the vulnerable eyes of women (pp. 24-25) makes this plain enough.

Thus, the hard questions about the psychosocial dynamics of "rape fetishism" and "rape voyeurism" go relatively unexplored, surprising for a book that is otherwise keen on deconstructing the discourses and forms of masculinity. As the expanded chronology of examples analyzed here makes clear, the phenomenon of representing rape as titillating erotica, of turning it into spectacle, is as old as rape itself. Yet there is another side to this problem of rape's spectacularization that Wolfthal's book does confront, and it does so with pathbreaking importance and a still-troubling topicality: the revelatory power of the victim's pain once it is made publicly visible. In capturing and displaying the fear, panic, injury, and pain of the victim, by making it the object of scopic fascination, eroticized rape imagery can indeed project a terrifying dehumanizing effect. But the same image, appropriated by critical consciousness, can serve to tear away the veil of privacy behind which real rape is often enacted and the ideology of rape reproduced. Within this ongoing dialectic, Diane Wolfthal's book will play a vital role. As social scientists and historians refine our understanding of the social, cultural, and psychological factors that make a given society prone or resistant to sexual violence, they will also have to ask whether a certain facility with images also favors the terrible persistence of rape.

Notes

(1.) The reference is to Susan Estrich, Real Rape (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987),

(2.) Gregory M. Matoesian, Reproducing Rape: Domination through Talk in the Courtroom (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 5ff. See also Andrew E. Taslitz, Rape and the Culture of the Court room (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

(3.) Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975).

(4.) See David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 355-68.

(5.) Margaret Carroll, "The Erodes of Absolutism: Rubens and the Mystification of Sexual Violence," in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed. Mary Garrard and Norma Broude (New York: Icon Editions, 1992), 138-58.

(6.) Joan Kelly, "Did Women Have a Renaissance?" in Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 19-50.

(7.) Diane Wolfthal, "'A Hue and Cry': Medieval Rape Imagery and Its Transformation," Art Bulletin 75 (Mar. 1993): 39-64.

(8.) Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, "The Heroics of Virginity: Brides of Christ and Sacrificial Mutilation," in Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 29-72.

(9.) See Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 5-6. A recent counterpart study is Corinne Saunders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001).

(10.) R. Hanning and P. Dinter, "Proposal for the Study of Heroic and Eirenic Thinking on Issues of Conflict, Peace and Security," paper cited in Wolfthal, 223 n. 180.

(11.) See Beverly Allen, Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

(12.) For excerpts from Franck's Chronica of 1531 (published in Frankfurt, 1585), see Gerald Strauss, ed., Manifestations of Discontent in Germany on the Eve of the Reformation (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1971), 215-18; for the mercenary broadsheets, see Keith Moxey, Peasants, Warriors and Wives: Popular Imagery in the Reformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 67-100.

(13.) For a review of the recent and past literature, see Norbert Schnitzler, "Picturing the Law--Introductory Remarks on the Medieval Iconography of Judgement and Punishment," Medieval History Journal 3, no. 1 (2000): 1-15.

(14.) See Ellen Rooney, "Criticism and the Subject of Sexual Violence," Modern Language Notes 98 (1983): 1269-78.

(15.) Gravdal (as in n. 9), 6.

(16.) Sharon Marcus, "Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention," in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 385-403.

(17.) Cf. the declarations of performance artist Diamanda Galas in Angry Women, ed. Andrea Juno and V. Vale (San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1991), esp. 8.

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